Acrobat's Document Review feature helps creatives streamline approval process

The traditional creative process can be challenging to manage especially when there's multiple reviewers. You know the process: create a PDF, email it to the various folks who need to see it, then make changes from multiple sources as they come back in. You're never sure if someone saw the email and it's easy to miss someone's comments coming back to you.

Many creatives typically send a PDF proofs of their work out to clients, managers and colleagues as an attachment, or a link in an email. What happens next can be painful, and gets a whole lot worse as you add more reviewers – managing versions and reconciling conflicting feedback through email and reminding people to open, review, and get back to you with their thoughts.

Luckily, Adobe came up with an answer for all of your creative feedback woes with Acrobat DC's new Review tool. This release includes new tools for sharing and reviewing PDFs and easily getting feedback from any number of reviewers. The new Acrobat Home view acts as a hub to keep track of all incoming and outgoing documents that are sent out or that are sent to you.

If you subscribe to Creative Cloud, you already have access to Acrobat DC.

Here's a quick review of the key features.

Easily invite others to review your work

You can easily enter people’s names or email addresses from your contacts and they will receive an automated message from Acrobat telling them that they have a PDF to review. You can also get a link to share that via email. People will be added to the review automatically when they click through the email message or the link.

No email attachments

Because it is hosted in Adobe Document Cloud, you don’t have to send attachments and feedback back and forth via email, because as you know PDFs can be too large and get blocked by file size limitations. And, all the various feedback lives on one single document.

Set due dates and automatic reminders

You can set due dates and reminders and Adobe will remind someone to review a design. Acrobat manages that for you.

Easily add comments to the PDF itself

With emailed proofs, the comments are often made via an email return message, which then have to be cross-referenced with the PDF you sent. With Review's PDF highlighting and commenting, this feedback can now be added right into the design that, and they can add comments to specific phrases, images, whatever. Anyone can do it intuitively from their laptop, tablet, or smartphone, just like they would in Acrobat or Reader.

Target reviewers with questions or comments

You can use @mentions to get another reviewer’s attention on a specific area. Multiple reviewers can use also @mentions to resolve conflicting feedback without going back and forth over email.

Easily track who has completed a review and what the comments were for each reviewer

The initiator of the review knows if someone has opened and reviewed my PDF at-a-glance. If you add several reviewers you can click into the review to see who has viewed it, who has not, and who signaled that they are done editing.

No need for the paid version of Acrobat to submit review

Finally, it's great that there's nothing to download or sign into; reviews can work completely on the web and don't need to be Creative Cloud or Acrobat DC users. All you need to use post a comment is a web browser. This is one of the key benefits of it being a hosted, cloud service.